What's the Style Reference Feature in Midjourney?

Let's explore Midjourney's Style Reference. You may have encountered 'sref' previously on x.com or youtube.com. It's a command provided by Midjourney to infuse a particular aesthetic into your generated images. It enables you to produce a single image with a unique style or generate several images with a consistent appearance.

The Style Reference is an excellent tool in Midjourney that accomplishes several tasks:

• Transfer specific style onto an image: Style Reference “clones” the aesthetic qualities of one image onto another, useful for you if you want a consistent look or to replicate classic styles.

• Generate multiple images with the same aesthetics: Style Reference ensures stylistic consistency across a series of images, beneficial for cohesive visual identities in art collections or branding.

• Explore new looks (with sref codes): You can experiment with new visual styles using specific sref codes, enhancing creativity and broadening artistic horizons.

• Enhancing Creativity: Style Reference allows for the mixing of various styles, fostering unique artistic combinations and new directions.

• Consistency in Projects: Ensures all project outputs maintain a uniform style, crucial for effective branding and thematic series.

• Experimentation: Facilitates testing how different styles affect various subjects, aiding artists in developing their unique style.

• Efficiency in workflow: Streamlines you workflow by allowing quick application of preferred styles, saving time and effort.

• Learning tool: Offers insights into visual design elements like color theory and composition through style analysis, serving as an educational resource.

Let's establish some ground rules, taken directly from the Midjourney documentation:

• Style references only apply to prompts that include text–they can’t be used with image-only prompts.

• You can also use prompt text to reinforce your style reference, and may need to with tricky styles.

• Any regular image prompts must go before --sref

• You can use multiple style references: --sref URL1 URL2 URL3

• You can also use --sref random to apply a random style to your images.

• --sref can be used with Midjourney and Niji Version 6
  

Now that we've covered the basics, let's start with an example:

That's our reference image. We take into account key aspects including the overall appearance, such as colors and lighting, as well as the scenery, which we aim to replicate.

If I want to generate an image of a glass of bourbon using the default settings, here's the result:

Now, after considering the reference image and running the same prompt again, here's the result:

Clearly, the generated images have undergone significant changes. Now that we've covered the basics, let's examine how we can adjust the images.

Style Weight

We have an additional parameter, the Style Weight Parameter (--sw), at our disposal. Its default value is 100, and it ranges from 0 to 1000.

The style weight of these images on the left is 10, the images on the right have a weight of 1000.

There's a noticeable difference. Thus, use the 'sw' parameter to your advantage, depending on your desired outcome.

Using multiple style references and weights

You can also use multiple image URLs as style references by separating each URL with a space after --sref. Moreover, you can assign relative weights to each image, similar to multi-prompting.

To set relative weights, add :: followed by the weight number after the image URL. For example:

image1_url::3 (gives the first image a weight of 3) image2_url::4 (gives the second image a weight of 4). So the final prompt could be something like:

Style Reference Versions

You can tweak the Style Reference even more by experimenting with different versions of the command ( --sv 4 is default).

• --sv 1 The original style reference algorithm, more “vibey”

• --sv 2 The second iteration of style references

• --sv 3 An updated version of the more “vibey” --sv 1

• --sv 4 An updated version of --sv 2

Style Reference Seeds

This feature is quite exciting. Instead of using an image or an image URL, you can also use a number. This allows you to select a specific style from the abstract range that Midjourney can generate. Instead of a fixed number, you can use the keyword 'random' for Midjourney to pick a style at random. This can be a lot of fun and yield incredible results, although sometimes it may produce very unusual outcomes. It's all about exploration.

So, this prompt provided us with four references we weren't familiar with. All results are random, and at the moment, there's no feature to explore all known references. Therefore, it's a process of trial and error.

So here’s another example of the same sref:

As you can see, even though the settings and subjects are completely different, the overall aesthetics are similar.

Styles vs. Image Prompting

It's important to differentiate between style references and image prompting. With image prompting, you place the image URL at the beginning of the prompt, and MidJourney uses all the content of that image as a reference. In contrast, style references only pull the overall style and aesthetics from the image.

Wrap-Up

The new Style Reference feature in MidJourney is incredibly powerful and user-friendly. While it's still in alpha and subject to changes, it's a fantastic tool for achieving consistent styles in your projects. Go ahead and experiment with it!

Thanks for reading, and I'll catch you in the next one!

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